In this article I'm going to describe how I render and composite my works.

Each time I expose one of my works, I'm always asked how I render it ? the truth is that I don't care much about rendering; but I do love post-processing! In particular, I really enjoy manipulating the color adjustments, masks, layers and my render passes.

Project overview

I'll start with setting the view for rendering. As soon as I was happy with the model, I needed to set it up ready for the final rendering, by going to Document > ZApplink properties > Cust1. Next, I set the document to the resolution I wanted the final render to be, by going to Document and setting the width and height to a good resolution and clicking Resize.

The model set up for final rendering

Setting up the final render settings

Setting the resolution

After my document was resized, I adjusted its position and scale by using the scroll and zoom keys located on the right of the viewport.

Now that my sculpt was no longer in Edit mode, I had to transfer it back over by pressing Ctrl+N to make a new canvas and dragging the model onto that new canvas. After this, I turned on Edit mode. If, at this point, I lost my view set, I could easily have recovered them by going to Document > ZApplink Properties > Cust1, which is where I saved my previous view.

Now I had to set my main light. To do this, I went to the Light tab and changed the position of the light by manipulating the tiny point on the sphere. Now I could start the render process!

I went to Render >Render Properties > Details and set it to 3. Then went to Render > Anti-Aliasing and set the properties as shown in the image below.

The anti-aliasing settings

I had to make sure I had assigned the right materials at this point (for me, I use the white cavity Matcap), and then pressed Best.

Next, I went to Document > Export to save my output image. You may be surprised, but the below is my main render! I know this is far from the final image that you have seen before, which is why it needed more passes.

Rj on Tue, 04 February 2014 9:38pm I like the complexity of the model, and the flare adds a lot of life to the image. One question, around the shoulder area, there is an indentation of what looks like a plus sign, on the right side of the image. How would you remove the pixelization of that surface? Did you not apply smoothing because it would ruin the complexity?